Democratic presidential primary heads for the finish line

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy stands on a car seat while campaigning in Sacramento, Calif., on May 16, 1968. Kennedy had won two of the three presidential primaries he had entered as he headed into California for the June 4 primary.

As the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries wind down, it’s worth noting that 40 years ago the race to succeed Lyndon Johnson was in the homestretch. As May came to an end, there were just two primaries to go: California and South Dakota.

If you compare the candidates of 1968 with the candidates of 2008, you’ll see obvious differences between the two top vote-getters, but you can find similarities, too.

One one side, you’ve got two candidates who were against the war from the beginning. Eugene McCarthy was always opposed to the Vietnam War and that made him popular with the youth. Barack Obama never backed the war in Iraq, and he also is a favorite of today’s youth.

Robert F. Kennedy was a carpet-bagging senator from New York who spent a lot of time around the White House as his brother’s attorney general. He helped craft early policy for Vietnam and later turned against the war. He was from Massachusetts and moved to New York to run for the Senate.

Hillary Clinton also spent a lot of time around the White House — in a different capacity, of course. The Illinois native and longtime Arkansan also moved to New York to run for Senate after her White House days were over. She voted to support the Iraq war before changing her mind.

There was joking around the Kennedy White House that Bobby was owed the presidency. Around the Clintons, it was legend that first it was Bill’s turn to be president, then it would be Hillary’s.

In the 1968 primary, though, the candidates competed in only 13 primaries. The wild card in this race was Vice President Humbert Humphrey, who made little effort in the primaries. Humphrey, meanwhile, had been making progress on two fronts, Time magazine reported in its May 24, 1968, edition.

Recently he has collected a bag of delegates in state conventions and caucuses in Maryland, Delaware, Arizona, Wyoming, Nevada, Hawaii, Alaska and Maine. Humphrey has also been doing well against Kennedy in public-opinion polls, outdistancing him by nine points in the Gallup sampling of Democrats reported last week. In April, Kennedy led by four. Humphrey has labor backing and strong support from businessmen, who by and large still distrust Bobby. He has even been gaining among younger voters — ostensibly Kennedy’s strongest bloc.

In the same story, Robert Kennedy noted with wry pride: “I am the only candidate opposed by both big business and big labor.”

On May 8, Robert Kennedy won the first primary he entered — Indiana — with 42 percent of the vote. McCarthy ran third, behind Indiana Gov. Roger D. Branigan, the favorite-son candidate who was believed to be running as a stand-in for Humphrey.

The New York Times noted that “Senator Kennedy has run for elective office only once before, in New York in 1964. He won his Senate seat there by a comfortable 720,000-vote majority.”

A week later, Kennedy won 51 percent of the vote in Nebraska to McCarthy’s 31 percent, the New York Times reported on May 16. McCarthy had pretty much abandoned Nebraska to marshal his forces in California. Humphrey garnered 8 percent of the vote, and Johnson, whose name was still on the ballot, took 6 percent.

On May 28, McCarthy pulled off an upset in Oregon, outpolling Kennedy 43 percent to 37 percent. It was Kennedy’s first defeat in three primaries. The Times said the loss in Oregon imperiled Kennedy’s chances in California, just one week away.

McCarthy told a cheering crowd of followers at his campaign headquarters (in Portland) that he believed he could now go into the California primary on even terms with Kennedy, the Times reported.